Tim Krause just turned me on to a (fairly) new tool that is pretty convenient for sending large files to multiple users (e.g., turning in a dissertation, submitting a book, etc. (-:). It's called Drop.io:

http://www.drop.io/

You can drop files (and even voice messages) via the Web, phone, email, or widget. Free for 100 MB. Not bad! For 1 GB, you can pay $10/year.

Dave

The Fall 2006 issue of KB Journal /(vol. 3.1), an online journal elaborating on the work of Kenneth Burke, is now available at http://kbjournal.org. This issue features articles by Keith Gibson on the influence of Frazer's The Golden Bough on Burke's Attitudes Toward History; by Robert S. Littlefield, Timothy L. Sellnow, and Matthew I. Attansey on crisis communication responsive to the 2004 tsunami; and by Timothy Crusius on Burke and ethics. Additionally, we reprint the entire preface to Burke's new book Late Poems, 1968-1993, and three selections, as well as a review of the book by Miriam Clark. We remember the contributions of Bernard Brock and Leland Griffin in essays by James Chesebro and Mark Wright. Our Happenings section offers photos of a new sculpture at the old Burke homeplace by Michael Burke. Finally, we offer several new research reviews of recent publications in Burke studies and begin a new "book gallery," featuring information about new Burke-authored books and their availability.

I thought I'd mention that a new project has just been launched by the MacArthur Foundation that should be of interest to many of us, the Digital Media and Learning Project. The overall goal is to study how new media technologies are changing the way young people "play, socialize, and engage in civic life." I think it's safe to say that we should also be studying how young people change those media technologies themselves (as active agents). We've seen plenty of that happen, and it's the source of much of our innovation (innovation that often matters most).

We've published a new book and launched a new imprint at Parlor Press that I hope will be of interest to Kairosnews readers. The book is Looking for a Fight: Is There a Republican War on Science? and it has been published under the new imprint Glassbead Books. As you'll see at the book's website, it's a Crooked Timber "book event" and collects respsonses to Chris Mooney's much-discussed The Republican War on Science. Many more such books are planned.

I'm happy to announce that volume 2, issue 1 of KB Journal is now ready for reading and commentary (KB = Kenneth Burke). It includes three essays, several book reviews, and some new Happenings. In this issue you’ll find articles on Native American rhetoric, advertising, and trained incapacity by some promising young scholars. KB Journal publishes articles under a Creative Commons license (one of the first in rhet/comp to do so) and is using Drupal as the platform. The new work includes:

Symbolic Suicide as Mortification, Transformation, and Counterstatement: The Conciliatory (Yet) Resistant Surrender of Maka-tai-mesh-ekia-kiak
Jason Edward Black, University of Alabama

Steven Johnson has a new article in the New York Times Book Review that discusses how new desktop search technologies enable (or stimulate) connections across our own writing, notes, published work, etc. I tend to write this way, but finding the paths has been tricky. Faster desktop searching has really been a great help. If something like Google Desktop would just search stickies, notes, and other types of files where it's more convenient to collect stuff, we'd have something.

Dave

Tool for Thought
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Published: January 30, 2005
---------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30JOHNSON.html

Kenneth Burke Conference: News Update

Kenneth Burke fans should know that there has been an addition to the already impressive cohort of keynote and featured speakers appearing at the "Kenneth Burke and his Circles" conference at Penn State next summer: Arabella Lyon of SUNY Buffalo, author of Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored.

Go to

http://www.outreach.psu.edu/cnf/kb2005/

to see the full list (click on the "Keynote and Featured Speakers" link located in the menu to your right).

While you're visiting the website, you can learn more about the conference, register, find lodging information, and submit individual paper or session proposals: Don't forget that the deadline to submit individual paper or session proposals for the conference is February 1st!

Computers and Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue.

Multimedia Composition: Pedagogies, Production, Possibilities

Guest-edited by David Blakesley and Karl Stolley

Deadline for submissions is May 1, 2005.

Multimedia composition is the craft of inventing, shaping, producing, and delivering text, audio, video, and images purposefully. As a craft (or art), it is a set of skilled practices for integrating content that may appear in various forms—words, sound, moving and still images, even physical objects—all in the interest of communicating, entertaining, or persuading. Producing multimedia used to be the sole province of high-end specialists with expensive technologies. Now, however, the creators of content—authors, designers, artists, musicians—are closer than ever to the means of delivering rich multimedia content to audiences. New technologies have made it possible for people who aren't technical specialists or professionals to compose multimedia. Yet the technical challenges remain significant. The tangible incentives seem disproportionate to our desire for composing and disseminating multimedia. We have yet to articulate a rich theoretical basis that would rationalize teaching multimedia as a new, if not primary, form of composition.

It's a wave . . .

Charlie and I have discussed CC licensing and I'm pleased to say that (some time ago) TWI decided to offer authors the option of copyrighting their work in this way.

It's pretty likely that TWI will make it standard to publish all work with a creative commons license with the copyright resting with TWI. That leaves the author with rights to the work and perhaps addresses the issue I mention here . . .